


Through the Bitter Water

by kerithwyn



Category: Fringe
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply - See end notes, Multi, OT3, Polyamory, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 23:39:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerithwyn/pseuds/kerithwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not the happy ending they were supposed to have. But they might get there anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Bitter Water

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: Post 4x22.
> 
>  **Warnings:** This story has some necessary warnings tags, but those warnings contain spoilers for the story, so they're in the end notes. If you'd like to look at them before reading, please click "More Notes" below.
> 
> Quite possibly the fic that gets me kicked out of fandom. (See rest of note at end.)
> 
> Thanks to samjohnsson for beta. All the faults are belong to me.

Lincoln’s been in his new home, in his new universe, for a couple of weeks. It’s been a grueling transition, so much to learn and to adapt to.

He must’ve been tired this morning not to have turned off the kitchen light.

He’s tired enough now that he doesn’t see the shadow on the floor.

“Lincoln.”

She says his name quietly, to keep from startling him, but it’s too late. He’d know Olivia’s voice anywhere, inarguably distinct from Liv’s. She’s sitting on one of the cheap kitchen chairs, temporary furnishings until he finds real furniture of his own. It’s a cold shock, seeing her here, and he’s briefly grateful for the exhaustion that keeps him from jumping out of his skin.

“The bridge?” he says, the first thing that springs to mind, and Olivia shakes her head. 

“I never needed the bridge. It’s still closed for now, though we can talk about reopening it--we got Jones,” she adds, interrupting herself. “And stopped the guy behind Jones, but it’s a long story. Lincoln, we can cover all that at the debrief, but I crossed over to find you.” Her eyes are steady on his. “We want you to come home.”

He falls heavily into a chair, no grace need apply. “‘We’?”

“Yes.” She hasn’t moved an inch, serene. “Astrid wants to bake a ‘Welcome Home’ cake for you. Walter misses his chess partner.” Olivia pauses, something like a smile starting to tweak the corner of her mouth. “ _General_ Broyles keeps grumbling about how no one wrote a debrief as cleanly as you.”

“General, huh. That’s...all very flattering.” His voice stays even, at least. “But hardly essential.”

“You’re essential to me. And to Peter.” Olivia finally winces, dropping her glance. “I’m...so sorry for how I hurt you.”

“You weren’t the reason I left,” Lincoln says harshly, and it’s true and not true at the same time. 

“No. But I--we--could have been a reason for you to stay. Lincoln...I _remember._ ”

Before, those words had been the end of something that had never really begun. Now, the way she’s looking at him, it almost sounds like....

Olivia nods to the question he hasn’t voiced. “The ‘how’ we can talk about later, but--all those memories I lost, I got them back. I remember the diner, and when you gave me the pendant. I remember thinking that if it hadn’t been for the migraine, I would’ve gone to meet you again at the diner that night and brought you home with me. If it hadn’t been for--”

“Peter.” Lincoln interjects. “But you remembered Peter. And chose to forget everyone else.” They’re bitter, the words, and the emotions underneath are even uglier. Lincoln had been trying to be, as Peter called him in the car, the good guy. Kept his feelings under wraps and his head down and his redundant presence out of the way, fleeing as far as another universe. He’d never had a legitimate cause for anger or disappointment; both were his own fault, Lincoln knows, for not saying anything to Olivia (or Peter, for that matter) in the short time they’d had together. The thing about emotions, though, is that they had very little to do with legitimacy, or logic.

But now Olivia was here, in the new space he’d been trying to make for himself, and all bets were off.

“It wasn’t just about Peter,” Olivia says, and her voice is so clear and certain that Lincoln can’t help but believe her. “The memories were so overwhelming, so intense compared to the life I’d been living, they felt like a place I wanted to be. A person I wanted to be.” She lifts her head, startled, her eyes finding his face again. “Kind of like coming over here must have been for you.”

“...unfair,” he protests weakly, a pointless objection he never meant to voice.

Olivia nods, acknowledging the low blow and refusing to take it back. “But I was wrong, Lincoln, that’s what I needed to tell you. I was wrong about my other life being...shinier, or better. In some ways, a lot of ways, it was worse. And you weren’t in it.”

In all the short time he’d known her, he never thought Olivia could be _cruel._ “Again, that’s...flattering. But unless something has changed, you and Peter still have that cosmic love connection.”

Olivia laughs suddenly, a startlingly sharp sound. “Peter said you’d call it that. And we do. But we’re also...we’re not good balances for each other.”

It sounds like something he’d wanted to hear two months ago, before he’d exchanged one universe for another. “I’m not your counterweight. Olivia, why are you here?”

“We want you to come home,” she says again, but this time her voice is low, the emotion in it turning her certainty to a whisper. “Everyone else too, but Peter and I, we need you.”

He stares at her. “I don’t see how. There, I’m just another agent and a...third wheel. Here, I can make a difference.”

But in the few weeks since the bridge closed, he’d begun to wonder. Sure, Fringe Division over here was glad to have him, and the bonus of being an acknowledged part of the effort to save the world was awfully nice. But he wasn’t trained for the work, he still needed to run their version of Fringe boot camp to learn all the protocols, and his skill set wasn’t of extraordinary significance. Just being a good cop wasn’t enough, no matter how easy Charlie made it look. He didn’t have Captain Lee’s science degree to fill in that gap in the team, and while his ability to spot connections had been useful, it wasn’t unique.

It was easy, he knew, to downgrade his own accomplishments. But there were reasons that Fringe field agents were among the elite here, and Lincoln had already begun to feel himself reaching to keep up with that august company.

And whatever might or might not have been brewing with Liv had been efficiently guillotined by Frank’s reappearance, whatever argument they’d had--he never did get the whole story--forgiven and forgotten in what had apparently been an epic make-up session. The wedding was back on schedule, the date neatly marked on Lincoln’s new digital calendar.

Neither of the Olivias had been the sum total of his reasons for jumping universes. But both of them had a lot to do with feeling that he might have found a home in one place or the other. That was no longer the case, in either universe.

Olivia was right, too; life over here did feel more intense, a product of the world’s foreshortened lifespan. He’d thrown himself into the flow, letting the excitement of all the new experiences and customs carry him along.

But once that wore off, what would he be? A man out of place, cut off from all the elements that had shaped him, a stranger in a strange land.

Lincoln had turned away, mired in his thoughts, and missed Olivia standing up and crossing over to him. His sense of self-preservation is failing rapidly in her presence and if she touches him it’s all over, and he can’t let himself be talked into...anything...by virtue of the fact that he’s too damn susceptible to touch after so long alone. There are too many gaps in what Olivia’s not saying and he’d made a commitment to this world; he’s not going to abandon it on a half-whispered suggestion.

“Don’t, please,” he says to her outstretched hand, and she stops on the instant. 

“Lincoln,” Olivia says, still too close. “Please.”

“ _What,_ ” he snaps, and doesn’t regret it. He’s genuinely angry now, at the presumption, and the--the timing, and the fact that Olivia hasn’t him given a single damn reason to reconsider. “What do you want from me?” 

She seems... _shaken_ by his anger, and that’s not a response he would have expected from Olivia Dunham. Either of them. 

“...Olivia? What’s--”

“Just...come with me,” she says, nearly pleading. “I’ll bring you back later tonight.” She says “Please” again, and her tone is so disquieting he can’t do anything but agree.

Olivia holds out her hand, waiting for him to initiate the touch. “Just get me home before I go on call tomorrow, or Liv’ll call out the troops. Literally,” he says, and Olivia smiles faintly as Lincoln takes her hand.

He’s always felt that crossing between universes should be more momentous. The first time, going through Walter’s reconstructed portal, there was only a brief chill that could’ve been his nerves as much as anything. Subsequent trips involved the bridge and were as anticlimactic as walking through a door.

Traveling with Olivia is like feeling the world slide away, everything falling sideways and down and inside-out at the same time. It’s thankfully brief, not even enough time for Lincoln’s stomach to protest the shift. His head, that’s another matter.

He’d forgotten how different his world smells: not cleaner per se, but sharper, all the scents subtly more acute. And more specifically, the distinctive smell of the old house in Boston. Something about that pings off his subconscious, but it’s deflected and forgotten by the sight of Peter, smiling at both of them. “Welcome home.”

The greeting is aimed at both of them, and presumptuous in Lincoln’s case. But still.... “It’s good to see you.”

“Definitely.” Peter’s glance at Olivia is piercing, with a subtext Lincoln can’t parse. “Everything go okay?”

“No problem.” She half-shrugs. “But Lincoln has reservations. I tried to explain, but....”

“Christ, Olivia, you tried to talk him into coming back?” Peter’s eye roll is full of mixed disapproval and amusement. “Definitely the wrong tack.”

“You had another idea?”

“Yeah.” Peter moves closer, obviously angling for a kiss, and again Lincoln has to shake his head. It’s a day, he thinks wearily, for denying all his own most-desired longings. 

“I’m happy to see you too, you have no idea. But if you were expecting us all to fall into bed tonight--” and the looks on their faces says yes, that had been at least part of the agenda, he hadn’t misread anything-- “as much as I want to, I have to say no.”

Olivia and Peter look disappointed, but not surprised, so at least they weren’t necessarily expecting him to be quite that easy. “But we can talk about that possibility, right?” Olivia asks softly. 

“More talking,” Peter says with an exasperated sigh, exaggerated enough that to indicate that he’s resigned to the necessity.

Olivia smiles tiredly. “Be right back. Jumping worlds makes it feel like there’s an elephant standing on my bladder.” She vanishes through the door toward the downstairs bathroom.

Before Lincoln can ask--because Olivia doesn’t seem entirely like herself--Peter says quietly, “She really needs you right now.”

“I don’t see--” how the situation has changed, he’s about to say, but Peter holds up a hand and goes on, words spilling out in a fast, low tone so Olivia won’t overhear.

“After the thing with Bell--we need to get you up to speed on what happened there--Olivia got checked out at the hospital. They told her-- we thought--” Peter swallows convulsively and Lincoln’s heart clenches along with the movement of Peter’s throat. “We thought she was pregnant. But it turned out to be a false positive, or she had an early miscarriage, or--”

He stops talking and Lincoln is shaken down to his core by the look on Peter’s face, all bewilderment and lost hope. As if he hadn’t considered the possibility before, only to have it taken from him....

“I’m so sorry,” he breathes out. That...changes things, makes the other issues between the three of them seem almost trivial. And makes him glad that he didn’t go for the easiest option.

Peter looks at him with unhappy eyes. “I don’t know how to talk to her about--” He stops uncharacteristically, clearing his throat before he goes on. “I hope you can. You were probably a better friend to Olivia than I ever was.”

“Still not a reason--” he cuts himself off. “Peter, of course I’m here for both of you, as much as I can be. But I have an obligation to the other side, that’s not something I’m going to abandon on a whim.”

“God, Lincoln, it’s not a whim.” Peter stares at him, like Lincoln’s supposed to have read his mind, and finally sighs. “Wish I’d made a move. On the bridge, if not before. But you’d made your decision and I thought, well, better to send you off clean than complicate things even more. But I wish I had.”

Lincoln can’t help asking. “What would you have said?”

Peter smiles slightly, a shade of his usual grin. “Not said. Did. If I’d just grabbed you and kissed you then, asked you to be with us, would you have stayed?”

“I-- I don’t know.” But oh, he does; it wouldn’t even have taken a moment’s hesitation to change his mind. Even with Liv standing there, a world’s worth of promise in her smile. Even without knowing that Charlie had been on his way back and he could have helped her through those rough few weeks. 

Olivia comes back into the room and Lincoln tries to school his face when he looks at her, but that’s a struggle he was always going to lose. She stops in her tracks, glancing at Peter. “You told him.”

“’Course I did, ’livia,” Peter says easily, but there’s a tension between them Lincoln hadn’t seen before, and he thinks maybe he’s beginning to understand what Olivia meant when she said that she and Peter weren’t in balance with each other. Which still doesn’t make him a necessary addition, but it’s...interesting. 

Olivia nods, biting at her lip before she turns back to him. “I-- we were surprised, and happy, and then--” she stops, shaking her head. “But Lincoln, that’s not the reason I went to find you. Peter and I had talked about you before--before that. We agreed we shouldn’t have let you go.”

“‘Let’ me,” he repeats, and it could be bitter but it’s not. “All things considered, you know, I wish you hadn’t.”

He takes a deep breath to counteract the effect of their anticipatory faces. “But this isn’t-- this isn’t the right time for a decision like this.” He looks at both of them, thinking that if Peter had only-- but it always comes down to timing, and theirs had just been wrong. “You’ve gone through a trauma, a loss, and you need to work through that before you-- we--” he groans and runs his hand over his face. “I, I love you both. You have to know that. But it’s not as easy as saying, ‘Hey, I made a mistake, I’m going back to my own universe.’”

“It could be,” Olivia says quietly. “It could be just that easy.”

Everything in him wants to agree, and he _can’t._ “I’m not sure when I became the responsible adult in this scenario,” Lincoln says dryly, with a smile to show he’s teasing. Mostly. “We haven’t even-- God, the three of us haven’t even been on a date. Or talked about anything important.”

“You want to be wined and dined first?” Peter tries for his customary snark, but it falls flat and he winces. “Sorry, wrong tone.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind some of that,” Lincoln says, because there’s a long way between “we like you” and “let’s build a life together” and they seem to want to skip all the pieces in between. “But right now, frankly, I’m a little more concerned about how you two aren’t--aren’t dealing with what you’ve been through, and I’m not going to _let_ you--” he emphasizes the point, an echo of a moment ago-- “push me into becoming your...coping mechanism.”

For a moment he thinks he’s gone too far, but it can’t be; if their offer, their feelings, are so fragile that he can’t tell the truth, this is never going to work in the first place. But after a moment Peter drops heavily onto the couch, and Olivia looks down, and Lincoln knows he was right to stand his ground.

“So where do we start?” Olivia asks, her voice a whisper. It’s quite possibly the first time in his life that Lincoln feels like he’s the one calling the shots in a relationship, like he’s the one who doesn’t have to wait on the other person’s decisions. Persons, in this case.

“With me,” Lincoln says, as gently as he can, “telling my friends how very sorry I am for what they’re going through.” And now he can cross the room, folding Olivia in his arms, and she sags against him. After a moment she shudders and starts to cry, fisting his shirt in her hands, and Lincoln glances over to see Peter watching them with mingled relief and sorrow on his face. “Come here,” Lincoln mouths at him, and Peter gets up and puts his arms around both of them, and that’s the way they stay as evening turns to night and the stars come out.

***

Olivia takes him back to the other universe, and after a few days the technicians on both sides get the bridge up and running again, so at least she doesn’t have to play constant ferry service. Over the next several weeks Lincoln works the job there and visits here, and things blur until he’s not sure what world he’s actually living in. Olivia and Peter don’t push, just include him in whatever they’re doing when he’s here--mostly renovating the old house, with Peter taking on a new project every couple of days without completing the last one. But when Lincoln’s tearing out a section of drywall and pauses to wipe his face, Olivia hands him a glass of water with a smile. Peter’s slipped away downstairs to cook up something complicated in the kitchen, and it feels and smells like _home._

The first time he kisses Olivia, it’s over a blessed cup of coffee. The first time he kisses Peter, it’s after a moment involving a dropped hammer and a lot of swearing. They do, actually, all go out to eat together, and buy groceries, and pick out some new furniture for the house. Lincoln reclaims his storage key from Peter--understandably, Peter hadn’t had a chance to go through the boxes--and pulls out a few of his favorite books for the shelves. 

That’s as much of a sign as anything, because he could’ve just as easily brought the books over to the other side and his place there. But that apartment is starting to feel abandoned, and Liv and Charlie don’t ask him if he’s got plans for when he’s not on call anymore, because he always does. Lincoln still enjoys working with them, for a given value of “enjoy” that includes occasional heart-pounding terror, but they don’t need him. Olivia and Peter....

They need him in ways he hadn’t seen before, never could have anticipated. He’s their bridge room, the way they communicate between their private universes. 

They do finally tell him what happened during the final confrontation with William Bell...including the details they don’t share with the other side, like the fact that Walter shot Olivia in the head. “And somehow,” Olivia says while Lincoln’s still processing that, “healing from that injury also brought back all my memories of both timelines. They weren’t lost, just misplaced.” But then she stops talking, seeing the look on his face as he thinks about her being shot, being _dead._ “Lincoln, I’m right here,” she says softly, and holds him until he can see her without imagining a world where she doesn’t exist.

They do, finally, start to talk about the lost pregnancy. Olivia’s cycles had always been irregular, so she’d had no idea, and a follow up test confirmed a chemical pregnancy. Whether the miscarriage had been a result of the Cortexiphan flooding Olivia’s body, or the stress of becoming the mother of the apocalypse, or the trauma of the brain injury, they would never know. “So many possibilities,” Olivia says in a flat tone. She and Peter understand the facts, the cold statistics, but Lincoln sees that what’s really getting to them both is the _idea_ of a child that they’d never really had time (or maybe even inclination) to consider before. 

Lincoln finds himself on the receiving end of two separate sets of confessions, all the bottled up emotions that Olivia and Peter hadn’t been willing or able to express to each other. 

Olivia tells him that her initial reaction to her pregnancy had been stark terror. Her fears about becoming a mother, her dread at the thought of what the Cortexiphan in her blood might to do a child. If she’d be condemning an innocent to being different than everyone else, to the kind of difficulties all the other test subjects had suffered. And horrible, soul-tearing guilt for having felt a fleeting moment of relief when she found out she wasn’t pregnant any longer.

Peter tells him, through gritted teeth, about the Observer’s revelation about the other timeline, about Liv and a child who now never existed. Lincoln’s first dazed thought is for the sheer _cruelty_ of it; telling Peter about a son he could never know sounds like either sheer malice or a basic lack of human understanding. Peter seems to think it was the latter and not unkindly meant, but the result was the same. He’s been left wondering if he’s just not meant to have a child, in any timeline, and what that means for his place in the world.

Lincoln ends up playing impromptu counselor to the two of them, first separately and then together. And then, pointedly, refuses to talk to either of them further until they get some real counseling, from someone properly trained in the dynamics of loss. Some of the details might be classified, but the core of the story is all too sadly familiar, and Lincoln doesn’t want anything to cast a shadow over their future. All of their futures.

By mutual agreement they all take a step back, giving themselves time to take stock of where they are and where they want to be. Lincoln spends some quality time working on the other side--and there’s still no lack of work to be done, despite the healing properties of the reopened bridge. It’s strange being there now, when he’s finally found what he’d been looking for all along in his own universe. 

He’s careful, very careful, not to let any hint of what Peter told him bleed over into his reactions to Liv in the here-and-now. Her subterfuge in this timeline is a thing of the past, put aside in the wake of all the other blows this world has suffered: Captain Lee’s death, Colonel Broyles’ betrayal. But his vigilance is almost irrelevant because Colonel Dahlander has taken over the reorganization of the division, shifting the bulk of its efforts toward reclamation. The most experienced agents are deployed to the still-unstable areas...and that doesn’t include him, so Lincoln spends most of his days working on the logistics of the recovery effort. And that’s fine, it’s valuable and necessary work, but he barely sees Liv (or Charlie or Astrid, for that matter) these days and without those familiar faces, this universe feels all the more alien.

When he returns to the old house after several weeks’ interval, the look on both Olivia’s and Peter’s faces tells him everything he needs to know.

The therapist had been, Olivia admits, a very good idea. She wasn’t a monster for having had natural momentary trepidation about her pregnancy; Peter understands that one (or two) lost chances don’t mean the end of all his hopes. They’ve talked, finally, about what they really want as they move forward with their lives.

“And no matter what else, that includes you,” Peter says firmly. “I’ve even convinced Olivia to take some time off. With the new funding, Broyles has plenty of room to get more people on board, so we’re not the only ones saving the world anymore.”

“Good to hear,” Lincoln says, and that’s all he can say before Peter kisses him, and Olivia kisses him, and they trade him back and forth between them like a ping-pong ball. Shortly thereafter he ends up in bed with both of them--together, and later singly--and it’s just as amazing as he ever might have dreamed. 

After that it’s impossible to imagine being anywhere else. All his reservations crumble in the wake of Olivia’s and Peter’s combined certainty, and by now he’s spent enough time with them to understand how he fits. His place in the world is assured, just like Robert had been trying to tell him; he’s found where he belongs, with them.

A detail belatedly occurs to him: each time Olivia had crossed universes previously, she’d ended up in a place equivalent to where she’d left on the other side. But his apartment in New York on the other side is nowhere near the house in Boston here.

“Oh, that,” Olivia says casually, her fingers drawing lazy circles on his chest. “You’re my anchor there. Like Peter is, over here. When I cross over, I can appear where either of you are.” She pauses, then adds, “I’m willing to lose the convenience, if you’re ready to come home...?”

He is.

***

Leaving a universe turns out to be anticlimactic, the second time.

“I’m happy for you,” Liv says when he tells her--the full truth, because she deserves it--and pauses. “I felt...guilty....”

But Lincoln shakes his head to keep her from finishing, because there had been no promises between them, and no obligations. “It’s okay, Olivia.”

She smiles at him and it’s a reminder that yes, he could have found a home here; it just worked out a different way. He can’t even say “better,” although part of him knows it is. He’s going back to the world he belongs to, and that feels right. Maybe only a time-displaced Peter Bishop really can make a place for himself in a world that isn’t his.

“I hope I’m still invited to the wedding,” he adds, and Liv grins.

“Of course. You all are. Even Olivia, if she’ll come. Tell Walter I’ll have a case of bobbins, just for him.”

And it’s nearly as simple as that. The division throws him a going-away party, although it’s likely he’ll be assigned as the permanent liaison between universes, since he’s now the one person with the best understanding of both worlds. That, too, gives him a unique place in the scheme of things. It’s almost enough to make a man believe in fate, although Lincoln’s very much aware of how many small variables brought him to this point, and how a change in any of them would have led to a different destiny. The very existence of the two universes (and more beyond that, if Walter’s theories are correct) proves the point.

There’s one more question left open between the three of them, and by mutual agreement they all decide to let things happen as they will. 

A few months later, it’s not a question any more, and the only (small, very small) squabble that erupts between the three of them is the argument over what name to give their daughter.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Warnings:** Lost pregnancy/miscarriage, pregnancy issues.
> 
> “We and you too, you most of all, dear boy, will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet.” -- Bram Stoker, _Dracula_
> 
> Dear fandom: Very sorry to be crapping all over your s4 happy ending. My brain is a bad place. For a much, much better take on a post-4x22 threesome, read Mona’s “Flooded All the Streams.” [Forthcoming to AO3, and I swear the similarity in the title was purely coincidental.]
> 
> Also, all my best stuff is stolen: “mother of the apocalypse” from ziparumpazoo’s “[Four Days and Change](http://archiveofourown.org/works/409346)”; Lincoln and Peter as Olivia’s compass points from rainer’s “[Liasion](http://archiveofourown.org/works/400337)”; Colonel Dahlander originally from elfin’s “[Things Shaped in Passing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/396387)” and now making the rounds. ;) 
> 
> A relevant statistic: [“Some researchers have theorized that as many as 70% of conceptions end in miscarriage.”](http://miscarriage.about.com/od/onetimemiscarriages/p/chemicalpreg.htm)


End file.
